A liberal education from a national standpoint: Knowledge, reason, and rebellion
Book 2, chapter 4, part 3 of An Essay Towards a Philosophy of Education by Charlotte Mason
We have been very busy about education these sixty years or more—diligently digging, pruning, watering; but there is something amiss with our tree of knowledge; its fruits, both good and evil, are of a mean, crabbed sort, with so little to choose between them that superior persons find it hard to determine which is which. To examine the individual apples would be a long process, but let me take one at a venture: is it not true that a conviction of irresponsibility characterises our generation?
If this be true, seeing that we all think as we have been brought up to think, our education is at fault. Faulty education is to blame if private property be recklessly injured in broad day, if working men do vital injury to their country thinking to serve their caste, if there be people who love to have it so, as long as their own interests are immune. The melancholy fact is that the people who do damage to private property, to public interests, and to that more delicate asset of a nation, public opinion, are all by way of being educated in their several degrees. All of them can write and speak clearly, think logically if not sincerely, and exhibit a certain practical ability. It is true that the War has changed much and has brought us a temporary salvation, but education must secure to us our gains or the last state of the nation may be worse than the first.
No doubt we are better and not worse than our forefathers; and, where we err, it is through ignorance. “Through ignorance ye did it,” was said of the worst crime that men have done; and that appalling offence was wrought for no worse reason than because it is the habit of more or less lettered ignorance to follow specious arguments to logical conclusions. The sapient East knows all about it. Lady Lugard tells us how “the Copts have a saying that ‘in the beginning when God created things He added to everything its second.’ ‘I go to Syria,’ said Reason; ‘I go with you,’ said Rebellion.” We need not follow the other pairs that went forth, but still Reason is apt to be accompanied by Rebellion when it sets out in search of a logical issue.
For it is a fatal error to think that reason can take the place of knowledge, that reason is infallible, that reasonable conclusions are of necessity right conclusions. Reason is a man’s servant, not his master; and behaves like a good and faithful servant—a sort of ‘Caleb Balderstone,’ ready to lie royally in his master’s behoof—and bring logical demonstration of any premise which the will chooses to entertain. But the will is the man, the will chooses; and the man must know, if the will is to make just and discriminating decisions. This is what Shakespeare, as great a philosopher as a poet, set himself to teach us, line upon line, precept upon precept. His ‘Leontes,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Lear,’ ‘Prospero,’ ‘Brutus,’ preach on the one text—that a man’s reason brings certain infallible proofs of any notions he has wilfully chosen to take up. There is no escape for us, no short cut; art is long, especially the art of living.
In the days when the working man represented only the unit of his family he picked up enough knowledge to go on with at church and chapel, by scrutinizing his neighbour’s doings, in the village parliament, held at pump or “public,” from the weekly news-sheet. But we have changed all that: bodies of working men have learned by means of union to act with a momentum which may be paralysing or propelling according to whether the men have or have not knowledge. Without knowledge, Reason carries a man into the wilderness and Rebellion joins company. The man is not to be blamed: it is a glorious thing to perceive your mind, your reasoning power, acting of its own accord as it were and producing argument after argument in support of any initial notion; how is a man to be persuaded, when he wakes up to this tremendous power he has of involuntary reasoning, that his conclusions are not necessarily right, but rather that he who reasons without knowledge is like a child playing with edged tools? Following his reason, he acquires this and the other sort of freedom; but is it not written:—
“Nor yet
(Grave this upon thy heart!) if spiritual things
Be lost through apathy, or scorn, or fear,
Shalt thou thy humbler franchises support,
However hardly won or justly dear.”
If, then, the manners and the destinies of men are shaped by knowledge, it may be well to inquire further into the nature of that evasive entity. Matthew Arnold helps us by offering a threefold classification which appeals to common sense—knowledge of God, knowledge of men, and knowledge of the natural world; or, as we should say, Divinity, the Humanities, and Science. But I think we may go further and say that Letters, if not (as I said before) the main content of knowledge, constitute anyway the container—the wrought salver, the exquisite vase, even the alabaster box to hold the ointment.
If a man cannot think without words, if he who thinks with words will certainly express his thoughts, what of the monosyllabic habit that is falling upon men of all classes? The chatter of many women and some men does not count, for thought is the last thing it is meant to express. The Greeks believed that a training in the use and power of words was the chief part of education, recognising that if the thought fathers the word, so does the word in turn father the thought. They concerned themselves with no language, ancient or modern, save their own, but of that they acquired a consummate appreciation. With the words came the great thoughts, expressed in whatever way the emergencies of the State called for—in wise laws, victorious battles, glorious temples, sculpture, drama. For great thoughts anticipate great works; and these come only to a people conversant with the great thoughts that have been written and said. In what strength did the youngest and greatest of our Premiers bring about the “revival of England”? He was fortified by illimitable reading, by a present sense of a thousand impossibilities that had been brought to pass—of a thousand things so wisely said that wise action was a necessary outcome. To say that we as a nation are suffering from our contemptuous depreciation of knowledge is to say that we scorn Letters, the proper vehicle of all knowledge.
Let us glance at the three departments of knowledge to see in regard to which of the three we are most in error. Some of us are content with such knowledge of Divinity as is to be picked up from the weekly sermon heard in church, but even with the qualification of a degree in Arts I wonder do our divines lift us as much as they might into that serener region where words fitly spoken beget thoughts of peace and holy purpose? That worship is the main end of our Church services is a sublime ideal, but, “The Way, without which there is no going, the Truth, without which there is no knowing, the Life, without which there is no living,” must needs be set before us in “words that burn,” and we wait for preachers like those of a bygone day, “Whose pulpit thunders shook a nation’s soul.”
It is possible that the Church may err in keeping us underfed upon that knowledge which is life, but she does not send us away empty. We get some little share, too, of literature, poetry, history: a phrase, a line, lights up a day for us; to read of Charles Fox’s having said, “Poetry’s everything,” of that black conqueror of the Soudan who said, “Without learning life would have neither pleasure nor savour”—these things do us good, we cannot tell why.
But there is a region of apparent sterility in our intellectual life. Science says of literature, “I’ll none of it,” and science is the preoccupation of our age. Whatever we study must be divested to the bone, and the principle of life goes with the flesh we strip away: history expires in the process, poetry cannot come to birth, religion faints; we sit down to the dry bones of science and say, Here is knowledge, all the knowledge there is to know. “I think that is very wonderful,” a little girl wrote in an examination paper after trying to explain why a leaf is green. That little girl had found the principle—admiration, wonder—which makes science vital, and without wonder her highest value is, not spiritual, but utilitarian. A man might as well collect matchboxes, like those charming people in one of Anatole France’s novels, as search for diatoma, unless the wonder of the world be ever fresh before his eyes. In the eighteenth century science was alive, quick with emotion, and therefore it found expression in literature. Still, a Lister, a Pasteur, moves us, and we feel that in one department of science, anyway, men stirred by the passion of humanity (“letters” at the fountain head?) are doing monumental work.
But for the most part science as she is taught leaves us cold; the utility of scientific discoveries does not appeal to the best that is in us, though it makes a pretty urgent and general appeal to our lower avidities. But the fault is not in science—that mode of revelation which is granted to our generation, may we reverently say?—but in our presentation of it by means of facts and figures and demonstrations that mean no more to the general audience than the point demonstrated, never showing the wonder and magnificent reach of the law unfolded. The Hebrew poet who taught us that “Breadcorn is bruised ... because his God doth instruct him and doth teach him,” glorified life. Coleridge has revealed the innermost secret, whether of science or literature: speaking on the genesis of an idea, he says, “When the idea of Nature (presented to chosen minds by a Higher Power than Nature herself),” etc. The man who would write for us about the true inwardness of wireless telegraphy, say, how truly it was a discovery, a revealing of that which was there and had been there all along, might make our hearts burn within us. No doubt there are many scientific men who are also men of letters, and some scientific books as inspiring as great poems—but science is waiting for its literature; and, though we cannot live in shameful ignorance and must get what we can out of the sources open to us, science as it is too commonly taught tends to leave us crude in thought and hard and narrow in judgment.
We are told that in times of great upheaval it profits not to cast blame on this or that section of the community; that we are all to blame even for the offences of individuals; and we partly believe it because our fathers have told us; thus did the prophets humble themselves before God, and bemoaned each his exceeding great sin in the sin of his people. We, too, are meek under chastisements, but we are vague and, to that extent, insincere. Perhaps our duty is to give serious thought to the problems of our national life; then we may come to realise that man does not live by bread alone; we may perceive that “bread” (or cake!) is our sole and final offer to all persons of all classes; that we are losing our sense of any values excepting money values; that our young men no longer see visions, and are attracted to a career in proportion as “there’s money in it.” Nothing can come out of nothing, and, if we bring up the children of the nation on sordid hopes and low ambitions, need we be surprised that every man plays for his own hand?
We recognise now and then, when the shoe pinches, that the nation is in the threes of a revolution, but do we take trouble to find out the cause of “industrial unrest” and the correct attitude of the public towards that unrest? The revolution which is in progress may, it seems to me, develop on either of two lines: the men may get those “humbler franchises” they covet, but at the loss of “spiritual things”—such as the character for fair play, straight dealing, and loyalty to contract, which we like to think of as distinctively English. But what about the warning that these “humbler franchises” will be likewise lost? Trade unionism is no new thing; centuries ago and for centuries, as we know, England and Europe were under the dominion of those states within the State—the Trades Guilds. At this distance of time we can afford to admire these for the spiritual things to which they held fast; their religious organisation, the thorough training they afforded to their apprentices, and the obligation every member of a guild was under to use just weights and measures and to turn out first rate work of whatever kind. But, notwithstanding these moral safeguards, the tyranny of the guilds became insupportable, and they disappeared into the limbo of things no longer serviceable. Could any dream of Socialism, again, offer more perfect conditions than did the Russian village communes? But these too established a tyranny which was felt to be more oppressive than serfdom itself: the Mir disappeared, lost in that Gehenna which engulfed the guilds.
Wordsworth’s prophetic lines should instruct us. “However hardly won or justly dear” those humbler franchises for which men are standing out in their tens of thousands with unanimity, courage, devotion to a cause justified by their Reason, they will not be able to support those same franchises if spiritual things, the real things of life, be lost in gaining them. Therefore we may predict that the present movement may well issue in worse things but will not issue in the triumph of either trade unionism or syndicalism.
Here is our opportunity. We blame the workmen for their irresponsible action, for what seems to us the reckless way in which the poorest are impoverished and multitudes of workers are compelled to unwilling idleness. But those of us who are neither miners nor owners may not allow ourselves irresponsible thought or speech, and we may contribute our quota towards appeasement. It is within everybody’s province to influence public opinion, if it be only the opinion of two or three; we may raise the whole question to a higher plane, the plane of those spiritual things—duty, responsibility, brotherly love (towards all men)—which make the final appeal. We could not, and we need not try to, obstruct the revolution of which we are vaguely conscious, but we may help to make it a turn of the wheel which shall bring us out of the darkness of a Simplon Tunnel into the light and glory of a Lombard plain. We may, respecting the claims of working men, perceive that they demand too little, and that the things they demand are not those which matter. Even the shock of a revolution is not too high a price for an experience which should convince us that knowledge is the basis of a nation’s strength.
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